Travel Itinerary Planner

Overview

This project is a Python-based tool to help users plan their optimal travel itinerary. It calculates the best route for a trip based on user preferences, available travel days, and travel costs, ensuring the journey starts and ends at a mandatory starting point (e.g., Bogotá).

The planner leverages exhaustive search with pruning and parallel processing to evaluate possible itineraries efficiently while adhering to time and cost constraints.

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Features

• User Preferences: Rate each destination on a scale of 1-10 based on how much you'd like to visit.
• Trip Duration: Specify the total number of days available for the trip.
• Mandatory Start/End Point: The trip starts and ends at a user-defined point (e.g., Bogotá).
• Optimization Criteria:
  • Maximizes preference points.
  • Minimizes travel costs when points are tied.
• Dynamic Itineraries: Handles flexible destination sets and connections.

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Algorithm

1. Input Gathering:

   • Users provide:
     • Preference ratings for each destination.
     • Total days available for travel.
   • Mandatory points (e.g., Bogotá) are included in all itineraries.

2. Exhaustive Search:

   • Generates all subsets of destinations (up to a defined size).
   • Evaluates all permutations of each subset.

3. Pruning:

   • Skips routes that exceed available travel days or lack valid connections.

4. Parallel Processing:

   • Subset evaluations are distributed across multiple processes to enhance performance.

5. Optimization:

   • Maximizes total preference points.
   • Prefers itineraries with lower costs if points are tied.

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Usage

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8 or above.
• The required destinations and connections are defined in a data file.

Running the Code

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone <repository-url>
   cd travel-itinerary-planner